Infor Process Automation - Interactive Briefing.

Good afternoon,
If you are not familiar with me, I am Principal Technical Support Analyst for the Infor Process Automation Support team. Coming up in June I will be hosting an Interactive Briefing for users of Process Automation Designer. We will be covering process design techniques and options in the context of designing for performance.

The plan here is to cover topics during the briefing at a why and when they should be used, then provide in depth recordings of how. I have a variety of topics to cover and I am just reaching out here to see if the community has any suggestions of additional material they would like to see in such a briefing. I may not be able to cover all suggestions the community makes but I will do my best to cover as many as I can.

I truly appreciate any suggestions you may have. Thanks

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Comments

andy

How can we attend?

unknown

How can we attend, can we cover the API transaction with Infor M3 and how can we avoid using the user name and password for multiple company approach

russel-cornelson

The briefing will be in late June, when I get details on how to sign up I’ll post it back here

unknown

Can we also have a sample flow that uses XML node.

unknown

Russell, Can't *wait*! Sounds like an awesomely, practical webinar.

Two suggestions, please:

1. Webrun Node and practical uses especially for calling Lawson/S3 actions (e.g. around jobs)

2. Make it more than an hour. I have a feeling there's a huge appetite for this.

Thanks so much,

Lenny (lc@choa.org)

nathan-taylor

I would like to know more about creating custom triggers and how to trigger from ESS/MSS.

unknown

Hi Russ - My response to your request has two parts, a direct answer/suggestion and then a more philosophical approach.

If I stick with the context of performance, my questions would be around the file access, data iterator and message builder nodes. The best way to read in files (file channels or is there a better way?), parse data and load it into Lawson. How to (best practice) manipulate data from a file prior to updating Lawson. (ie: GL files, Refund files, benefit deductions).

Above are the things I struggled with when I first started developing in IPA and was asking for best practice. Now I'm with the others who've commented and want practical examples of when/how to use the Web Run/service and XML nodes. How to create a process trigger. I'm not sure if those topics fall into "designing for performance".

IPA has such a wide range of capabilities, I struggle(d) with what are my week points, where do I need to focus my growth? In my case I'm a SQL developer, so If I'm going to design my flows for the best perfomance... do I need to strengthen my java script skills... should I focus on learning a robust scripting language? Are web nodes and web services going to give me the most functionality and/or options, so I need to learn how those work and how to leverage them?

I am involved in the IPA community and it has been my experience with Infor classes, user group meetings, winter showcase, etc... the people I meet who are becoming the IPA developers are not necessarily strong technical people. A lot are, but a lot are not. IPA was/is marketed as a simple easy to use automation tool. And it is. So users are being trained to create flows and use the tool and then figure out they don't have the big picture technical background to understand all of the functionality and capability that IPA has to offer. It is my opinion that to improve performance of flows, there also needs to be an understanding of what additional 'tools' a developer needs or could use in their sandbox to make the most of IPA. Because it's so flexible and has so many things it is capable of doing, it's also complicated.

Thank you for asking for our input and I'm looking forward to participating.

Joan

unknown

"It is my opinion that to improve performance of flows, there also needs to be an understanding of what additional 'tools' a developer needs or could use in their sandbox to make the most of IPA." Amen, Joan!

I find myself using SQL and Linux commands where ever possible in place of java script, and bcp/sqlcmd/osql (whichever gives me the output that is closest to what I want

) to speed up my flows every little bit that I can. The biggest flow bottlenecks we have here involve loading files or getting data from databases on other servers. Our group doesn't have permission to use bulk insert sql or create SSIS packages, and I am wondering if I should start to make some noise to change that. I would be interested to know what others are using to get files/data loaded quickly? As an old Lawson 4GL developer, I miss the days when I could just drop a big old csv in the /work folder and process it in seconds with a custom 4GL program.

IPA may be versatile and even powerful in some ways, but its file handling capabilities are disgraceful. Perhaps Infor assumes that file loads should be taken care of outside IPA, and if so, I'd love to find out what they recommend as best practice, so I can make a business case for more technical training for our team!

0712131256598360.doc

john-miller

As part of the briefing - For cloud users, if there are any configurations, or settings inside landmark that we have control of to help the performance of IPA. Or any monitoring tools that may be available to us, so we can proactively alert Cloud Ops if we believe a Node needs attention.

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